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Lan networking in Java

Hello

I hope I'm posting in the right sub-section.
Last semester in university I successfully made a graphical chess game (thanks to some people on this forum) in java as my end of term project for programming.
This term I have an option of adding LAN networking to my project .

Question: How hard would something like this be?
I've never done anything like that in any programming language so I don't know how difficult/easy it is to do.
Could someone perhaps guide me along the right path here or at least throw some links to materials that I should read before
I attempt to do this?

The requirements are that when I start my program I will have a small window in my gui where I will input the port/IP adress and that stuff to connect to another computer on a lan network
after which the game will start like a normal 1v1 chess game.